The Big Black Mamba

 So after a good week of hair-pulling, I've realized the decisions I made for the book were pretty much the right ones in the first place. 

Not even sure I could structure it better if I chose to re-write from scratch. All my notes ended up being variations of "do what is already there, just punch it up a little."

I did have some good insights as to some of the key things happening in the sword fight scene, and how to better work with the pants scene. And I'd already decided to re-write the panto scene from the top, and I've more or less come around on extending the final sewer trip a bit with some more incidents.

I used to think of re-writes like surgery. As I get better, it is more and more like a laparoscopic procedure. Not quite out-patient, but getting closer.

And that's good, because line edits always feel a bit like murder. A story and the people in it have a sort of false life, and getting down to the individual sentences and word choices strips out the illusion. It becomes like waking from a dream.

What I mean is, when you are having a dream, there is this illusion of all sorts of lovely detail and consistency, but when you try to remember and write it down you realize just how little was actually there. Story is the same way. Strip it down to words and that face that you picture in your mind so clearly is a mention of a hair color and a frequent grin. And with one edit, the grin can go away.

***

None of my beta readers so far read on a computer so I have to have a print-ready manuscript before they can even get at it. Makes me less eager to make use of their services. But even the paid readers I've been eyeballing, I don't want to contact until I've at least run my own grammar check. And that needs to wait for me to finish the clean-up and tightening.

And I'm so over this. I wish I could just send this off to a publisher and let them worry about it. Well, sure, their in-house editor would mail be back with a list of things they need me to do, but at least that would be a month from now.

***

Finally got into it yesterday. The only good thing that came out of being sick (although I spent most of today feeling so ill I watched the pilot of Deep Space 9 and the first half of Megamind). 

I already blue-lined around the spots where there was a big lecture that either felt extraneous or boring or out of character or more like all three. Well, I'm finding it surprisingly easy to throw out half those paragraphs entirely, and re-write the survivors to be more compact. And also more in keeping with the characters and the themes and arcs as I worked them out through writing the rest of it.